The Forever Book

A key moment in cybernetics was Von Neumann’s attempt to figure out what the smallest possible self-reproducing machine could be (even though he never published this work). There were plenty of examples of large self-reproducing machines – all living creatures – but what was the tiniest thing that could reproduce itself? Out of that line of inquiry came his seminal ideas of automatons, and eventually a lot of artificial life work. Recently biologists have begun to ask the same question: what is the smallest living thing we can imagine; how small can life get? Out of this line of thinking exobiologists and origin of life researchers have experimented with the smallest possible bits of self-reproducing RNA – which are much smaller than what we find in the wild on earth.

I’ve been thinking of civilization (the technium) as a life form, as a self-replicating structure. I began to wonder what is the smallest seed into which you could reduce the "genes" of civilization, and have it unfold again, sufficient that it could also make another seed again. That is, what is the smallest seed of the technium that is viable? It must be a seed able to grow to reproduction age and express itself as a full-fledge civilization and have offspring itself -- another replicating seed.

This seed would most likely be a library full of knowledge and perhaps tools. Many libraries now contain a lot of what we know about our culture and technology, and even a little bit of how to recreate it, but this library would have to accurately capture all the essential knowledge of cultural self-reproduction. It is important to realize that this seed library is not the universal library of everything we know. Rather, it is a kernel that contains that which cannot be replicated and that which when expanded can recover what we know.

Seeds are good for many things. They are good for next season renewal, or in dormant mode for some species, for continuity over long gaps. They are also food (input) for other projects. We know that oak trees can be compressed into acorns, and whales compressed into a fertilized zygote, so I think civilization can be compressed into a library of sorts. The unpacking of this seed requires the right environment and time scale (in the whale's case it needs a mommy whale, and an oak needs a forest and soil) so the creature is not entirely compressed into the seed alone, but still it is handy enough.

I also believe, but cannot prove, that there is more than one seed. There is likely more than one way to compress and encapsulate the complexity of the technium, just as there is more than one way to fold a protein. We can imagine all kinds of seeds (libraries) that could continue some aspect of civilization by being replanted, rediscovered, or simply renewed. Some may be bigger than others. What is the smallest library that could contain the essential bootstrapping notions and knowledge of civilization? The smallest must in fact only contain information, since via the correct information, any tool needed could be built.

The seed of the technium must be a bootstrapping device. The foundational information provides the guidance to construct the tools which are used to unlock yet more knowledge, which in turn is used to understand the remaining instructions, which are used to create yet more tools and understanding. Ad infinitum.

Clearly such a library would have to be able to convey, among all the other things, how to make a library full of books, since that is in many ways an essential part of civilization. Thus we have the library that can self-replicate, the forever library. What is the smallest possible self-replicating forever library? It is possible that with digital technology it will someday be no bigger than a book today. And since it contains primarily information we could think of the self-replicating forever library as a self-replicating book, Forever Book.

I have been thinking about what it would take to construct a Forever Book just as an experiment.

On the first level this is a book that tells you how to make itself, and more. Upon contemplation I realized my project would actually be a series of books. Each edition would improve upon the basic idea until the last book contains a recivilization kit, a book that can continue to replicate itself forever.

Here is how the series goes:

Version 1 is a laser printed book that reprints portions of old manuals on how to make paper, how to do movable type and how to book bind, etc. It thus contains the general information on how to make another book like itself. (This is the stage I am working at now.) It works at the concept level, but may or may not be very practical. Making paper and ink is not very hard, but making type is.

Version 2 is a laser printed book that has similar information of how to make a book from scratch but this information would be modernized, synthesized, and tested expressly for this project of making only a few books by hand. Using version 2 you could make a book, but not the book you started with.

Version 3 is a fully handmade book made entirely by this elementary process. Within its pages is the information on how to make another one just like it. On handmade paper pages it would show you how to make the very page itself, and the chapter on ink would be printed with ink made by the process shown, etc. It is a true forever book.

The next step would be an expanded Forever Book that would be more like a Forever Library.

Version 4 is a DVD or equivalent that tells how to make a DVD (or equivalent) starting with the skills of a handmade book. I am not certain you could contain all the knowledge need to re-create a DVD from elemental materials like silicon, aluminum, petroleum and copper into on DVD. There might be a whole shelf of DVDs needed.

If you keep expanding the notion, you come to a library of DVDs, hard disks, computer networks, and the web that contains all the knowledge needed to replicate the library of hardware and software that holds the knowledge. This library is essentially a recivilization kit, a self-replicating knowledge that captures some basic civilization skills. It is can be very big. At the extreme, the meta-library of all the books and documents on earth today is a forever library. Surely everything we know includes the information about how to do it again.

But the trick is to encapsulate into one source, the minimum amount of knowledge to restart civilization somewhere along the lines we are now. What is the least amount of knowledge you'd need to restart the technium in, say, three generations? Or one?

One’s definition of technology and civilization will vary, and so there will be many approaches to this seed. This is the fun part. It’s like doing backups. Different needs will drive different strategies. Some people would aim for a self-replicating library "seed" that restarts fast – an ten-year instant start pack. Maybe you want one of these for a space ship. Or you might want a civ-seed that unpacked very deeply, but slow, taking much nurturing but yielding a very robust technium. Or some forever seeds might be designed to produce a very directed type of civilization, say one that either avoided or embraced religion, or shifted the notions of women. Two other versions of the seed: The "feral" version is a seed able to sprout in a waste land, with no mommy, no soil, the after-the-Armageddon version. It is able to restart civilization with little nurturing. This version would have to be completely self-evident and able to withstand the ignorant. The second, is a seed that must sprout to maturity in competition with other emerging forever seeds, or even an already established culture. It must be aggressive, weed like, and resilient to disruption by other seeds. There might be thousands of ways to unroll a forever book.

I don’t imagine anyone beside me being interesting in making a version 1-, 2-, or 3- of the Forever Book – that is a book made from mulberry bark and soot ink. But I can imagine many people being interesting in making up a version 4 Forever Book. They would spend years carefully studying, selecting and balancing the content of books, video, music, knowledge, websites that would entail a self-replicating library embedded in a modern media. The popularity of lists on Amazon, bibliographies, and lists of links on blogs and elsewhere attests to the appeal of making the Grand List of Most Essential Knowledge. Their ultimate list of sources would have to enable any reasonable person studying the material to reconstruct at the very least the medium of the list itself and to reproduce the contents of the list. This is a big job, one that gets more difficult as the media becomes more sophisticated. (Imagine the instructions need to teach someone to build a DVD). And of course the library of what we know expands every day.

However the real challenge to constructing a deep Forever Book of the technium is that I suspect that most of the knowledge require to reconstruct technology is not even recorded. There is a vast amount of implicit knowledge in expert’s head which is passed on in the factory or office and not all at documented, especially in a library. Extracting such fundamental knowledge may not be possible for amateurs.

Yet I can imagine the Forever Book project becoming an enthusiast’s passion, with personal versions shared and admired. "Wanna see my version of a Forever Book?" Who else is going to take such a wide cross-disciplinarian view of what we know? Who else will try to reconstruct the steps needed to arrive where we now are?

A Forever Book also can serve as a pedagogical device, too. As Stewart Brand said about the idea: “The appeal here is that every new human, through their education, in effect restarts---or at least rediscovers---civilization.” Trying to assemble and working through the elements of a civilization-restart manual is potentially the best education there could possibly be.

I can imagine the Forever Book League, which is an elite meritocracy, a club whose members have all achieved the following:

1) Every member has created his/her version of a Forever Book which contains instructions for making at least 100 copies of itself. AND
2) At least one recipient of those copies has made a second generation copy.

One could speculate there would be “races” between libraries. The way to win is to be clear, logical, and orderly enough in constructing your Forever Book so that someone else could make your "book" by following your book. This is a race to the second generation.

This encourages trans-generational communication because a prospective member of the Forever Book League can't gain entrance unless they secure evidence that a second generational participant has succeeded. (There may be an additional motivation needed for second generation makers to communicate with the first generation makers.) I'd like to be a member of the Forever Book League. If this idea appeals to you as well, let me know.

Posted on February 22, 2006 at 11:15 PM

Comments

You take as a given that all books available today would be sufficient to recreate civilization. If we go back a thousand years, “all books in the world” is an amount we could wrap our minds about, but would it be sufficient to recreate the civilisation of that day? If not, when did the libraries attain this critical mass?

Considering how little we understand of the dynamics of our own cultures, why wikipedia works, how some countries avoid war, e.t.c how can we know that some of our achievements are all documented in books and not ingrained in the somewhat accidental cultural “system configuration” itself?

As an apropos, Jorge L. Borges wrote a story about a weed-like forever book which replaced one culture with another.

Posted by Robert on April 29, 2008 at 4:57 AM

Walter, the bootstrapping knowledge is not a single document. It’s a library. Can all knowledge be formalized? No. But enough may be. It’s worth trying the experiment.

Posted by Kevin Kelly on February 21, 2008 at 10:41 AM

I’m not clear on whether you mean to imply that all the knowledge necessary to restart civilization could be captured “formally.” Various writers disagree on the extent to which you can capture knowledge formally, but my impression is that they’d mostly agree that something on the scale of civilization has too much tacit connectedness to be bootstrapped from a single document. I agree that significant “formal attractors” could be reproduced….whether a self-reproducing civilization could ever result is less clear.

Posted by WalterRSmith on February 18, 2008 at 7:54 PM

This actually reminds me somewhat of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in “The Diamond Age,” which made an initially illiterate girl into a queen. Of course, she started with spoken language and knowledge of some stories.

How exactly would this go down? Say you start with a post-apocalyptic scenario, with civilization reduced to a hunter-gatherer level - and then what? How does the book come to have an influence? Does someone just pick it up out of curiosity? And then what, does it teach them a language? How durable does this thing have to be? Would it be shaped like a monolith? (Kidding on that last one…sorta.) What if the very fact that the civilization acquires all this knowledge “from Heaven” inevitably screws it up, makes it overdependent?

Hell, all the monolith in 2001 had to do to kick-start humanity was teach them how to think and how to use tools. Then it just vanished.

Posted by Shaye Horwitz on December 6, 2006 at 2:24 AM

I enjoyed reading about this idea (as I have when reading anything related to The Long Now). I found some similarities in efforts at my workplace, a huge auto manufacturer. We have been trying to capture all of our “working knowledge” to facilitate training and recovery from catastrophic events.

My questions about the Forever Book is:

1) Who is the audience for such a document? This is critical to determine the medium or media used in the book’s construction. If your audience is alien, pre-literate, illiterate, etc., then spoken/written word will not work. The book will have to be visual, at least up to the point of teaching language, assuming the audience can even develop language. And a visual Forever Book assumes that the audience can see things and perceive them as we do now.

2) What is the purpose for such a document? Of course, no matter the purpose, there are huge educational benefits to just creating the thing - the best way to learn is to teach. But if the purpose is a back-up for future generations of humanty after some catastrophe, the Forever Book takes on a more narrow form and I think is quite useful. Other than that, I’m not sure what it would be good for, but it is quite a captivating idea.

Posted by Bryan Arnold on August 17, 2006 at 6:28 PM

A very interesting idea. But, the first ‘Forever Book’ - the start of the Technium - may have started with a creature who wanted something badly. And it could not get it without a tool.

So… the smallest Forever Book may be nothing more than desire.

Posted by Ronald Snijder on April 26, 2006 at 10:19 PM

No, Lance, the Forever Book does not deliver, or try to deliver, utopia. It is an unfolding, a process that never finishes, and that is, because it is real, a flawed, imperfect tradeoff of various benefits and their side effects — and many unexpected things.

Posted by Kevin Kelly on March 14, 2006 at 5:59 PM

My comments are less about metallurgy-anvil-machines unfolding and more about semiotics. And I’m mixing content levels by bringing up religious fundamentalism as part of the manual interpretation process. I realize Forever Books are more towards road building than happiness or personal mission statement building.

Coming from the USA Southeast, and raised in an environment where protestant fundamentalism was a norm, I saw how a large book took on a high degree of effect in building the society.

I am concerned about the interpretation/extrapolation process in a Forever Book. A circular response loop starts between the source and interpreter. I guess it is that unfolding ripple effect that my post is pointing at. And this sometimes invisible loop is intertwined with the stuff called anvils and satellites.

I recommend a Forever Book (especially the feral version which is what we needed in my home country of Arkansas) contains some help, e.g. interpolation, in avoiding traps of misuse of some instruction statement.

At a meta-level, in your quest into the Technium questions,
maybe the question I am raising is related to your muse on the Amish selection of technology, and also the happiness/consumerism ratio. What cycles of thought/lifestyle/epistemology cause the herky-jerky motion of unfolding the ForeverBook into its iterative stages?

One of your central tenets of evolution is central to this undependable punctuation of unfolding : disequilibrium. I guess my post, at first, was an expression of discomfort over the tension supplied by disequilibrium. But I can see a level of cross-purposes where the Forever Book writer may have to make a decision that is a hard one. If the goal is civilization, how much disequilibrium is the book creator comfortable in generating? Should this Forever Book aim for utopia? Or the world like we have now? I could try to be rhetorically clever and say “should it have a social goal?”, but that conveniently forgets that the book has to have a goal.

Is the summation in the book “Out of Control”, or is there more to it? I guess thats why you’re writing this new book.

Finally , its ironic that the Forever Book concept comes along so far upstream from the origin source of civilization. It is in of itself a paradox.

Posted by Lance Miller on March 14, 2006 at 2:57 PM

Yes, Jochen, there would have to be different books — different seeds — for different staring fields. A stark moon, or a biologically rich planet, or our own earth in some dark age.

And I agree that recreating a DVD is a gigantic undertaking. But it is not impossible. And it may be that if you only wanted to teach how to make a DVD and nothing else, it may be a shorter path then you think. (It’s easy to tell someone how to do a cataract surgery if that was only what you needed to learn.)

However you do ask a reasonable question about survival in the development time. A seed that took 50 years to fruit would need to convey the essentials of surviving for 50 years.

Posted by Kevin Kelly on March 3, 2006 at 8:43 PM

Interesting idea. Two thoughts on that: First, as you already mention briefly, there probably would have to be many Forever Books, because they depend on what you already have. As the chicken egg needs a mother to incubate it, the Forever Book needs at least some natural fiber to created paper from etc. Not very helpfull if you are stranded on the moon or something. So where is the boundary between what you take for granted and what can be taken from the environment? Can a Neandertal man use your book? Maybe you have to teach him language first and writing? I can imagine that it would be possible to create such a book though. Maybe for a kind of Robinson who learns how to create such a book again on his island. He’ll need a few years, but he’ll be able to do this. But the DVD is much much more difficult. You need actual computer chips and chip factories to do this, probably one of the technically most difficult things to do. We only had DVDs for a few years now. So it would be impossible for one person, even a thousand persons to create this from scratch in a few years. You’ll need many people and probably many generations. But if your instructions are to be complete, don’t you have to teach those people also how to stay alive in the meantime? How to feed themselves when half of the population is working on this DVD project. How to not kill each other when they disagree. You have to teach them how to communicate effectively, how to travel to other parts of the world to get raw material, to get this material out of the ground, to build international trade, basically you have to teach them how to build a society. Because only a complex society like ours has the means to (re)build the Technium. So there have to be many things in this DVD, not only those things you directly need to make a DVD but all the things that support those things, on those that support those… On the other hand: The first time we build this Technium all we started from was the big bang. Maybe thats all the instructions needed. It worked the first time around, it might work again. So maybe your seed is really small, just a few laws of physics?

Posted by Jochen Topf on March 3, 2006 at 5:11 PM

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